Insect and Spider Identification: CLOSED: CLOSED: Pyralis lienigialis or P. farinalis?, 1 by wallaby1

wallaby1 wrote:
Ken, or anyone else with a good moth book, lol, I would like to know what the difference is between these two species, Pyralis farinalis and Pyralis lienigialis.

This is what the ukmoths has to say about Pyralis lienigialis, and although their pic shows it to be a very dark moth I'm not sure if that is the whole story. I would fit into the right area, although they say the south Midlands, I do have moths which are said to be only from further south and I'm not far off that.

http://ukmoths.org.uk/show.php?id=2423

This Polish site shows a small pic of Pyralis lienigialis and the map shows it to be well distributed. The colour is more like mine, it is the underwings which I can see on some of my pics which look like this pic. That is, brown with two wavy white lines. I have one pic which shows the underwings as white with black mottling, taken on a different day to the other with no mottling.

http://www.lepidoptera.pl/show.php?ID=1548&country=SE

P. farinalis on ukmoths,

http://ukmoths.org.uk/show.php?id=495

One difference I am seeing besides the underwing is the white line near the top of the wings, on P. farinalis it looks to have a squarish shape, on P. lienigialis it is wavy. Whether this is variable I don't know. I have seen a pic of P. farinalis with the brown underwing, if it is correctly identified.

This pic of P. farinalis has the squarish white shoulder line, but with brown underwings.

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyralis

The next pic of P. farinalis also has the squarish white shoulder line, but with mottled underwing!

http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bild:Pyralis.farin...

The constant seems to be the squarish white shoulder line for P. farinalis, not the colour of the underwings.

I have pics of moths on three different dates, although the last two are possibly the same moth.

First on 28th July, this one is very dark, has mottled underwings and the white shoulder line doesn't look very square cornered, a little more wavy.